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One has to travel far back through the archives of RPS to discover the last mention of The Ultima 6 Project, a remake and embellishment of the original game that uses the Dungeon Siege engine. A Mr Gillen was the last to write of the game, his cockles toasting in the glow caused by such a large mod project reaching the 1.0 milestone. Now, two and a half years later, the project has reached 1.1, with quest improvements, bug fixes, improved mapping and additions to the dungeon system. Those last changes are important because some of the dungeons are gargantuan and you’ll need all the help you can get.

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Gas Powered Games wants $1.1 million of your dollars. I also want $1.1 million of your dollars, but – instead of spending them on a mansion made of trampolines and a pony that’s also a rocketship – the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander dev is hoping to bring an RTS-RPG called Wildman to life. It’s about prehistoric evolution, but with an amusingly silly twist. “What if men, when they evolved into the homo sapiens form, what if other creatures also evolved, and other creatures had sentient minds? You could fight, say, a giant fly creature, or a lizard creature, or wild animals. What if there were thinking cats and things like that? Insects that are just creepy, that grew and were vying to take over the planet,” explained Taylor in an interview with RPS. So it’s part exploration-based hack ‘n’ slash, part troop-commanding RTS, and part fly monster. Got it. Video after the break.

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If you really, really want to besiege dungeons three-at-a-time, then this competition is for you. In celebration of there first being Dungeon Siege, and then two of it, and now three of it, the lovely chaps at Square and Obsidian have provides three sets of all three games for you guys to win. That’s right: Dungeon Siege One, Two, And Three (Count ’em!) for you to play. They’re Steam codes, too, so if you already have one of the games you could always pass the code along to a chum. That sounds like a decent prize to me, but what to do to win it?

Well, we want dungeon-themed limmericks. Send yours to this address, and the best of them, as judged by us, will win the codes. The competition closes 12 noon UK time on Monday. Also see: rules.

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The third siege of dungeons arrived a little while back, with Obsidian taking the reins of the Gas-Powered Games-created loot’n’kill fandango. I’ve been frantically clicking my mouse button at it for the last few days – an act which I have now transmuted into some words.

First point of interest for me in any dungeon crawler: can I summon animals? Silently beating up monsters in rock corridors gets pretty lonely, after all. Also, I’m really very lazy – if there’s some companion animal doing half the damage for me I don’t need to press so many number keys. Get to it, my furry friend.

Dungeon Siege III delivers on this front, at least. My stocking-wearing gunwoman can summon a spectral hound to antagonise foes while she snipes them from afar. On top of that, one of the AI-controlled companions (only one of which you can have with you at any one time) can summon a flaming hound. It’s doggy carnage out there.Read the rest of this entry »

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Hrm. I’m a pretty wary of pre-ordering games personally – I like to hear at least some reception before I invest in a game – but if you were in the market for Dungeon Siege III anyway, you’ll be very pleased to hear that future-buying it via Steam means you’ll be gifted a free copy of both Dungeon Siege 1 and 2. Which is a pretty good deal – although I rather suspect that the kind of person who would pre-order Dungeon Siege III probably already owns the other games anyway. Still, this would appear to be their first appearance on Steam (if indeed that it how they’re being distributed), so that’s good news. Gradually transforming one’s games library to a purely digital form is forever appealing – I know I’ve a whole bunch of disc-locked games that I wish could instead be summoned from the crowd.

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It’s always heartwarming when one of these enormous mod-projects actually reaches the holy 1.0. They started in 2001. And now, in 2010, they release their complete Ultima VI mod for Dungeon Siege. You can go and get it here. I can only give them a hearty round of applause. And, alas, I mean it literally – I’ve long since lost my copy of Dungeon Siege, and it’s really tricky to buy online (You’re best off trying on a place like Amazon). No video of the finished version available, but here’s a little footage from the 5th out of 8th milestone…Read the rest of this entry »

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[When thinking about which post-mortem to lob up when I was away, this one struck me as most appropriate. Since I’ll actually be at Gas Powered games during my awayness, Dungeon Siege seems like a good idea. I give a little of the context in the piece itself, but it was wayyyy into the evening and the booze was getting to both Chris and myself, crouched around the Dictaphone and both saying things we really shouldn’t (very few of which had anything to do with videogames). Chris Taylor is an effusive bloke, to say the least. Worth noting that this was done prior to DS2’s launch, and before Supreme Commander was even vaguely revealed.]

We find ourselves at a glamorous Microsoft press-event in San Francisco. “Glamorous” being code-words for “There is alcohol here”. They’ve gathered their sharpest minds to introduce their typically polished portfolio for the next twelve months, so are presented to the gregarious and effusive Chris Taylor. We start getting nervous, with images of epic mechanical destruction clouding our otherwise purely objective minds.

We try to leave before we start gushing about how much we loved Total Annihilation, only to see Brian “Rise of Nations” Reynolds in the opposite direction. Oh no. Pincered by two genuinely great RTS developers. There’s only one thing for it: start asking questions about how Dungeon Siege came to be and what he learned from it. Because while it’s an undeniably splendid game, it’s also a game that which we’re slightly more capable of keeping a little journalistic distance. An interview about how CUTE the Commander is won’t be of much use to anyone.